Collection: The Axe Forgets but the Tree Remembers

The Axe Forgets, But the Tree Remembers is an exhibition about memory, harm, and the uneven weight of experience. Borrowing its title from the proverb, the work explores how violence, injustice, and neglect are often carried differently by those who inflict harm and those who endure it.

The axe cuts and moves on, its action purposeful, normalized, even justified as “just doing its job.” But the tree remembers. It holds the wound, the scar, the altered shape of what it once was. The impact lingers long after the moment of damage has passed.

Through this body of work, the exhibition reflects on personal and collective histories, asking viewers to consider who is allowed to forget and who is forced to remember. It speaks to inherited trauma, systemic harm, and the quiet resilience of those who carry marks that are invisible to others.

Presented at The Billie Holiday Theatre, The Axe Forgets, But the Tree Remembers invites audiences to sit with discomfort, reckon honestly with the past, and recognize that healing begins not with forgetting but with remembrance.